OhGod3001
Heya all,
Sorry if this has been posted elsewhere, etc., please point me in the right direction if it has 'cos I couldn't find it!
Right, we have a mirrored database with full safety and a witness for automatic fail over, all works fine, very impressed with it. Now I need to backup the database involved and this is where I could do with some help and answers and/or tips.
As the mirror database is off-line/recovering it seems you can't back that one up, but I'd like to have something that tries to back it up for if/when it fails over and becomes the primary. The solution I've used for now is to write a small .Net application that uses the client side fail over connection string (Data Source=Server1;Failover Partner=Server2) so that it connects to whatever system is currently the primary, and then issues the relevant 'BACKUP xxx' statements to backup the database.
This applications is launched from a windows scheduled task job on the hour (or near to it), every hour. At 06:00 it does a full backup, at 12:00, 18:00 and 00:00 it does a differential backup, and all other times it does a transaction log backup.
This all seems to work fine so far, and generates all the relevant backup files to a share on another server.
So, my main question is; does this look like a good plan Am I missing some really simple wizard or button that would backup the relevant database from whatever server is up
Secondly, are the backups from each server interchangeable as they're in a mirrored configuration That is, for example, the backup application (on the hour) connects to Server1 does a full back up, followed later by a log backup. Server1 then dies, so the next time the backup application runs it connects to Server2 and because of the current time does a log backup from Server2. If we had to restore from backups, could we use the full backup and log from Server1, followed by the log from Server2 Otherwise I'll guess I'll need to modify the logic for the backup application to detect it's failed over, and maybe do a full backup on Server2, or something like that.
Anyway, thanks for any help/advice/tips,
Gareth/OhGod